Justin du Coeur

Fascinating article here on TechCrunch, about a longtime startup called MaidSafe which is starting to stick its head up after *many* years in stealth mode.

Summary: they're attempting to essentially rework the upper levels of the Internet/Web stack, replacing them with a general architecture for peer-to-peer applications. There's no such concept as a "server" in this architecture -- all apps are decentralized, with redundant data, encrypted communications, and a BitCoin-style currency native to the network.

Frankly, it's a remarkable shoot-for-the-moon longshot -- one of the relatively rare startups that is *much* more ambitious than Querki. I would give them longish odds of success -- they're quite explicitly disrupting everyone's established business plans -- but their architecture sounds about right. (Frankly, it's along the lines of my idle "how *should* applications work?" musings.) It's very exciting, in a very geeky kind of way, and deserves to be taken seriously.

Worth keeping an eye on, especially for me: if this starts to go anywhere, I'm going to need to figure out how Querki would work in this model. I'm fairly sure it could be made to do so -- I've had the question "How would a decentralized version of Querki work?" in the back of my mind from the beginning -- but it would require enormous changes, both technical and business...